Bear Island

‘The Silver Harvest. Engine failure in a Force Ten. Two hours she was broadside to the seas, two hours before we could get a line aboard. Her skipper— her skipper—’

‘MacAndrew. John MacAndrew.’

‘Thank you, Mr Stokes. Broke his neck. Towed his boat—and him with his broken neck in splints— for thirty hours in a Force Ten, four of them in a Force Eleven. Man, you should have seen yon seas. I tell you, they were mountains, just mountains. The bows thirty feet up and down, up and down, rolling over on our beam ends, hour after hour, every man except Mr Stokes and myself coughing his insides up—’ He broke off as Heissman rose hurriedly to his feet and ran from the saloon. ‘Is your friend upset, Mr Gerran?’

‘Couldn’t we heave to or whatever it is you do?’ Gerran pleaded. ‘Or run for shelter?’

‘Shelter? Shelter from what? Why, I remember—’

‘Mr Gerran and his company haven’t spent their lives at sea, Captain,’ I said.

‘True, true. Heave to? Heaving to won’t stop the waves. And the nearest shelter is Jan Mayen— and that’s three hundred miles to the west—into the weather.’

‘We could run before the weather. Surely that would help?’

‘Aye, we could do that. She’d steady up then, no doubt about it. If that’s what you want, Mr Gerran. You know what the contract says—captain to obey all orders other than those that will endanger the vessel.’

‘Good, good. Right away, then.’

‘You appreciate, of course, Mr Gerran, that this blow might last another day or so?’

With amelioration of the present sufferings practically at hand Gerran permitted himself a slight smile. ‘We cannot control the caprices of Mother Nature, Captain.’

‘And that we’ll have to turn almost ninety east?’

‘In your safe hands, Captain.’

‘I don’t think you are quite understanding. It will cost us two, perhaps three days. And if we run east, the weather north of North Cape is usually worse than it is here. Might have to put into Hammerfest for shelter. Might lose a week, maybe more. I don’t know how many hundred pounds a day it costs you to hire the ship and crew and pay your own camera crew and all those actors and actresses—I hear tell that some of those people you call stars can earn a fortune in just no time at all—’ Captain Imrie broke off and pushed back his chair. ‘What am I talking about? Money will mean nothing to a man like you. You will excuse me while I call the bridge.’

‘Wait.’ Gerran looked stricken. His parsimony was legendary throughout the film world and Captain Imrie had touched, not inadvertently, I thought, upon his tenderest nerve. ‘A week! Lose a whole week?’

‘If we’re lucky.’ Captain Imrie pulled his chair back up to the table and reached for the malt.

‘But I’ve already lost three days. The Orkney cliffs, the sea, the Morning Rose—not a foot of background yet.’ Gerran’s hands were out of sight but I wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d been wringing them.

‘And your director and camera crew on their backs for the past four days,’ Captain Imrie said sympathetically. It was impossible to say whether a smile lay behind the obfuscatory luxuriance of moustache and beard. ‘The caprices of nature, Mr Gerran.’

‘Three days,’ Gerran said again. ‘Maybe another week. A thirty-three day location budget, Kirkwall to Kirkwall.’ Otto Gerran looked ill, clearly both the state of his stomach and his film finances were making very heavy demands upon him. ‘How far to Bear Island, Captain Imrie?’

‘Three hundred miles, give or take the usual. Twenty-eight hours, if we can keep up our best speed.’

‘You can keep it up?’

‘I wasn’t thinking about the Morning Rose. It can stand anything. It’s your people, Mr Gerran. Nothing against them, of course, but I’m thinking they’d be more at home with those pedal boats in the paddling ponds.’

‘Yes, of course, of course.’ You could see that this aspect of the business had just occurred to him. ‘Dr Marlowe, you must have treated a great deal of sea-sickness during your years in the Navy.’ He paused, but as I didn’t deny it, he went on: ‘How long do people take to recover from sickness of this kind?’

‘Depends how sick they are.’ I’d never given the matter any thought, but it seemed a logical enough answer. ‘How long they’ve been ill and how badly. Ninety rough minutes on a cross-Channel trip and you’re as right as rain in ten minutes. Four days in an Atlantic gale and you’ll be as long again before you’re back on even keel.’

‘But people don’t actually die of sea-sickness, do they?’

‘I’ve never known of a case.’ For all his usual indecisiveness and more than occasional bumbling ineptitude which tended to make people laugh at him—discreetly and behind his back, of course—Otto, I realized for the first time and with some vague feeling of surprise, was capable of determination that might verge on the ruthless. Something to do with money, I suppose. ‘Not by itself, that is. But with a person already suffering from a heart condition, severe asthma, bronchitis, ulcerated stomach—well, yes, it could see him off.’

He was silent for a few moments, probably carrying out a rapid mental survey of the physical condition of cast and crew, then he said: ‘I must admit that I’m a bit worried about our people. I wonder if you’d mind having a look over them, just a quick check? Health’s a damn sight more important than any profit—hah! profit, in these days!—that we might make from the wretched film. As a doctor I’m sure you whole-heartedly agree.’

‘Of course,’ I said. ‘Right away.’ Otto had to have something that had made him the household name that he had become in the past twenty years and one had to admire this massive and wholly inadmirable hypocrisy that was clearly part of it. He had me all ways. I had said that sea-sickness alone did not kill so that if I were to state categorically that some member or members of his cast or crew were in no condition to withstand any further punishment from the sea he would insist on proof of the existence of some disease which, in conjunction with sea-sickness, might be potentially lethal, a proof that, in the first place, would have been very difficult for me to adduce in light of the limited examination facilities available to me aboard ship and, in the second place, would have been impossible anyhow, for every single member of cast and crew had been subjected to a rigorous insurance medical before leaving Britain: if I gave a clean bill of health to all, then Otto would press on with all speed for Bear Island, regardless of the sufferings of ‘our people’ about whom he professed to be so worried, thereby effecting a considerable saving in time and money: and, in the remote event of any of them inconsiderately dying upon our hands, why, then, as the man who had given the green light, I was the one in the dock.

I drained my glass of inferior brandy that Otto had laid on in such meagre quantities and rose. ‘You’ll be here?’

‘Yes. Most co-operative of you, Doctor, most.’

‘We never close,’ I said.

I was beginning to like Smithy though I hardly knew him or anything about him: I was never to get to know him, not well. That I should ever get to know him in my professional capacity was unthinkable: six feet two in his carpet slippers and certainly nothing short of two hundred pounds, Smithy was as unlikely a candidate for a doctor’s surgery as had ever come my way.

‘In the first-aid cabinet there.’ Smithy nodded towards a cupboard in a corner of the dimly-lit wheel-house. ‘Captain Imrie’s own private elixir. For emergency use only.’

I extracted one of half a dozen bottles held in place by felt-lined spring clamps and examined it under the chart-table lamp. My regard for Smithy went up another notch. In latitude 70° something north and aboard a superannuated trawler, however converted, one does not look to find Otard-Dupuy VSOP.

‘What constitutes an emergency?’ I asked.

‘Thirst.’

I poured some of the Otard-Dupuy into a small glass and offered it to Smithy, who shook his head and watched me as I sampled the brandy, then lowered the glass with suitable reverence.

‘To waste this on a thirst,’ I said, ‘is a crime against nature. Captain Imrie isn’t going to be too happy when he comes up here and finds me knocking back his special reserve.’

‘Captain Imrie is a man who lives by fixed rules. The most fixed of the lot is that he never appears on the bridge between 8 p.m. and 8 a.m. Oakley—he’s the bo’sun—and I take turns during the night. Believe me, that way it’s safer for everyone all round. What brings you to the bridge, Doctor—apart from this sure instinct for locating VSOP?’

‘Duty. I’m checking on the weather prior to checking on the health of Mr Gerran’s paid slaves. He fears they may start dying off like flies if we continue on this course in these conditions.’ The conditions, I’d noted, appeared to be deteriorating, for the behaviour of the Morning Rose, especially its degree of roll, was now distinctly more uncomfortable than it had been: perhaps it was just a function of the height of the bridge but I didn’t think so.

‘Mr Gerran should have left you at home and brought along his palm-reader or fortune-teller.’ A very contained man, educated and clearly intelligent, Smithy always seemed to be slightly amused. ‘As for the weather, the 6 p.m. forecast was as it usually is for these parts, vague and not very encouraging. They haven’t,’ he added superfluously, ‘a great number of weather stations in those parts.’

‘What do you think?’

‘It’s not going to improve.’ He dismissed the weather and smiled. ‘I’m not a great man for the small-talk, but with the Otard-Dupuy who needs it? Take the weight off your feet for an hour, then go tell Mr Gerran that all his paid slaves, as you call them, are holding a square dance on the poop.’

‘I suspect Mr Gerran of having a suspicious checking mind. However, if I may—?’

‘My guest.’

I helped myself again and replaced the bottle in the cabinet. Smithy, as he’d warned, wasn’t very talkative, but the silence was companionable enough. Presently he said: ‘Navy, aren’t you, Doc?’

‘Past tense.’

‘And now this?’

‘A shameful come-down. Don’t you find it so?’